Blue Sky Redemption
by AngelTheSeventh
Summary: In the time of apricorns and atom bombs, Orson Dröge doesn't catch Pokémon - he hunts them, and Yuri is an abnormal latios who isn't supposed to exist. In the wake of tragedy, their unplanned survival ropes them into a quest for revenge and a fight for their lives in which they're not exactly the good guys. Two against thousands, zero chance of survival. Every war has its warriors.
1. Complex

_Mom has what she calls an 'open-window complex', Yuri._

It was hypnotic—gliding in lazy, rhythmic circles far overhead, tawny wings spread triumphantly over the bristled shell of the woods, claiming the sky as its own.

 _It's really stupid._

If he did this right, his prey would never see him. All it would see was sky, bright azure for thousands of miles save for the orange tinge toward the western horizon, and the dark blur of trees and cliff faces far below it.

No, even after he knocked it out of the sky, it wouldn't see him. The poor bird would wake up in a metal cage with a floor too flat and smooth for its calloused feet to grasp, walls too close for its wings to spread, and it'd be stuck in there for what would feel like half an eternity, not mere days, before it saw the sky again.

 _She leaves the windows of her car open when she drives along the cliffs. You know, in case she goes over the edge and falls in the ocean._

His job was to get it there.

He slid a careful, gloved hand near the old and rusting trigger of his Ruger, raised the barrel towards the break in the trees far above where stark daylight sieved through.

 _She's always been so paranoid of death. Kind of ironic._

He watched his target through the scope—something he'd managed to fashion himself, with the ocular of a broken pair of binoculars left behind in the landfill. The quality of the thing wasn't worth the hour it'd took to build it, to get it exactly right, but it helped his aim. Somewhat.

The bird flapped its wings, distorting the silhouette through the scope and morphing into a smeared shadow flickering in and out of vision as it soared. His finger tapped impatiently against the trigger—a nervous habit, just barely in sync with the loud, unsteady thrumming of his heart.

 _Mom says if she does fall—and she never will, I bet you ten whole bucks—she won't drown, stuck in her car. She'll just unbuckle and swim through a window._

Twigs snapped. His heart froze up painfully in his chest and his head whipped around, quick eyes catching a glimpse of flashing brown slipping through the trees.

Just a stantler.

 _But it's stupid! And she knows it. That's why she gave it a name. If the windows are open and she falls—and she won't! —then the car'll fill with water faster. She basically has the same chance of drowning either way. Yeah… you agree._

He growled to himself, casting a sweeping glare at the mess of warm colors and brown that was the forest, struck with autumn, alive with the whisperings of hidden pokémon and subtle winds rustling fallen leaves. He knew, despite the stillness, that he was never alone out here; he knew even his hunter's eyes would never fail to make him think he was.

He backed up against the thick trunk of a tall oak, letting out a breath. He raised the barrel again after readjusting his grip, flicked absently at the trigger as he scoured the yellow-tinted sky through his scope, searching for his prey.

 _If she's going to leave the windows open like that, she might as well not even strap in. Heck, she should leave the doors open, too!_

There.

 _What's really stupid is the fact she can just take a hammer or something in the car with her, just in case, to smash the windows. There! Paranoia curbed, windows closed. Then we don't have bugs getting in all the time._

Flying in circles and circles and circles almost directly above him, perhaps spying prey of its own, perhaps only enjoying the sky while it had it to itself. Not a care in the world.

 _But she won't. She'll be darned if she doesn't keep those windows open._

Orson suddenly grinned—his crazed, face-splitting grin, the one he hoped to God or whoever that no one but his mother or his prey ever saw. She'd at least understood it enough to give it a name—hunter's joy. _There's a reason we love what we do._ Perhaps if someone from town watched him hunt, they wouldn't have the guts to hate him for what he did anymore.

 _The best part is that she knows it's dumb. She just does it anyway._

He took the shot.

If the bullets were solid steel and made to kill, he would've flinched at the sharp _crack_ sound ricocheting from the end of the barrel, knowing whatever was unlucky enough to be in his sights was at its end. He would've listened to the rustle of flapping wings, bolting footsteps, and frightened cries as the forest pokémon fled from him, flew from him, darted out of his way as he took off sprinting almost faster than they could.

But the bullets were only steel-plated, equipped with a needle for piercing flesh, not a rounded face for punching through it. Nothing heard the shot but him—but maybe they listened to his prey's cut-off shriek of surprise as the bullet hit its mark, buried in the muscle of its right wing. It was numb and knocked-out before it could register the pain.

They heard him when he bolted, tossing the old shotgun over his shoulder where it swung against his back, held to his body by a wrinkled leather sash. The pokémon would only run from him if he got too close in his sprint for the falling bird, not that he would notice—his eyes were sifting wildly through the crisscrossing canopy of bare gray branches, through the fragments of blue sky for the tawny shadow as it began to plummet.

The Ruger knocked against his spine as he leapt over fallen logs buried in leaves, charged through bare bushes, scaled rocks—pounding uselessly where it had for years and years, that one spot on his back that was numb to it now. His feet didn't feel where they clipped on hard stones, his skin where tiny branches whipped at his bare face, already rubbed red and raw by the cold. If he tripped, he rolled with the momentum and sprang to his feet before he realized, neck still craned to stare unblinkingly at the fractured pieces of sky above.

He listened to his prey's limp, numb body crash though a canopy of thin twigs and branches, made brittle by the relentless cold of late fall. Sticks and broken-off pieces of bark rained down as it toppled out of the sky, stubborn wings still spread like they'd somehow manage to catch a wind or gale of some sort to save it, to turn its fall from something violent and crushing to something slow and gliding.

Its stiff, lifeless wings tore apart any breeze they might otherwise catch, flipping backwards as its body slammed against a branch that would not be broken. The bird was sent spinning, hurtling at its terminal velocity towards the floor of a clearing where Orson sprinted, breathless and adamant. He bounded over a dubious root, lurching from the earth like it'd grown that way specifically to trip him in that moment if he wasn't paying attention. Narrowly, his foot missed it, and he shot ahead, suddenly so sure that there was nothing in his way anymore, nothing but empty space and air between him and his falling prey.

Its wing unfurled, reaching for the ground, inches away—but he slammed into its still, warm body, barely managing to lock his arms around its torso as he knocked it out of the air,securing the large bird against his body. He twisted as he fell, scraping along the soft leaf-covered ground on his back, hands buried in the wild and matted feathers of the pidgeotto.

Orson stilled and let himself collapse where he lay, sighing as all his muscles relaxed, as his head fell back into the soft carpet of dead leaves below him. He let a hand rest against his chest, felt for his racing pulse, crushed down like he was trying to force it to slow, but it did not relent.

The shotgun dug into his back and ground against his spine where he wasn't numb, and he winced. He got a grip on the unconscious pidgeotto and pushed himself up. He stared down at its disheveled form in his lap, wings crumpled against its body, head lolling over his knee, lank red crest matted with knots—they always looked so much more majestic in the sky, where they belonged. So ugly and out of place on the ground.

Tentatively, he reached for its right wing and began unfurling it, fighting the locked stiffness in its joints and slowly, gently, working it open. He didn't need a wing attack to the face if it happened to wake up—he had enough scars.

Fully extended, he could count the wing's feathers, the different shades of white and brown speckled across its coverts and shoulders. The way it was marred by the silvery bullet buried in the muscle. He grabbed it and pulled the needle out fast, shoving it into a bag in his pocket—it'd be disinfected later and the chemical knockout solution reapplied.

Orson worked its wing back against its body, though it seemed more unwilling to close than it had been to open, and held the pidgeotto in one arm as he stood and started retracing his steps—they were easy to follow. He'd carved out a path of trampled leaves and fallen twigs in his mad sprint for his prey as it fell, eyes trained only on the pidgeotto as he crushed or shoved aside anything in his path.

Cradling it like a small child, Orson started to run again, streaking in flying leaps instead of fast and agile bounds over bare bushes and stones. He ran and the dying woods collapsed into a blur of orange, yellow, and gray, wide streams of mixing color flanking his sprint. He ran and gazed up at the way the trees seemed to bend towards him, the earth with them, stretching and warping in his vision till it seemed like the world itself was propelling him along, back the same way he'd come—there was the undulating oak tree he'd leaned against to take his shot, there was the dried-up riverbed that'd long since filled with dead brown leaves that rippled like pseudo-water as he sprang across, clearing the gap in a single leap. He'd been taught how to do it right—how to throw your weight back and force your whole body to ricochet forwards, how to always make the jump and land with barely any free space behind your heels.

The forest began to whip itself back into its usual theme of sharp lines and angles as he slowed to crouch at the base of a large, half-buried rock where a bicycle leaned. It was an old, rusty thing, its blue paint having long since chipped away to reveal its brittle silver skeleton, but he knew from years of use that it was adamant. If it was going to fall apart, it would've done it years ago.

Orson swept away some leaves at the rock's base after laying the pidgeotto gently on the ground beside him, digging up a leathery backpack. He rummaged inside, sifting through bullet cases and old paper bags he hadn't thrown away, most of them only big enough to hold a canteen and an odd sandwich or two, but a few were so large he'd had to fold them twice and cram them at the bottom. He took one and smoothed it out, turning it on its side to, rather carefully, work the pidgeotto inside.

He could rest just the bird in the bike's wire cage if he wanted to. The bag wasn't really necessary to take it where it needed to go—but something had always felt wrong about biking through town with a knocked-out pokémon out on display for everyone to gawk at like it was dead.

No, they would only see a large brown paper bag, obstructing their view of his face. They'd only see the bag and have to guess what was inside, whether that be a pokémon or not. Living or not. _A_ _Schrödinger_ _'s meowth, but with a bag instead of a box,_ he'd often thought to himself when he was younger, struggling to keep his teeth grit and his head high as he biked into town—then, he'd had the support of his mother at his side, warding away the harsh stares and rude comments he endured alone now. _Dead or alive, they can think whatever they want about it and you can't change that. If they saw it, if you didn't have the bag, you're basically making the decision for them._

He grabbed the backpack and steadied the bag in the half-cage crudely attached on the front of the bike before mounting it and taking off, pedaling hard against the soft resistance of dead leaves below. He swerved between the trees and scoured the blur of foliage around him for the original path, just a winding trail of uneven concrete that died out barely a mile into the woods and snaked back to town, slowly growing in width and smoothness like it was more confident near Jheriko. It was always a little harder to find in fall when everything in the woods was obfuscated by a storm of leaf corpses—the pokémon used it as camouflage and the road was an inch or two under it all, but he saw where the trees parted unnaturally through the dense haze of orange and brown, like an aisle. He squinted as he rode closer and saw patches of rough concrete showing through the leaves.

He pulled onto the path and sped up, finding it easier and easier to maneuver where the ground was more solid, where nature gave way to something manmade, Jheriko's only extension of civilization in these woods.

The path wound along a steepening cliff face, edged in treacherous crags and juts, some of which housed clusters of twigs and down—pokémon nests. The cliff was a goldmine as a little kid—he'd stand in the middle of the path, poised and ready to run, shotgun leveled at the chest or wing of whatever bird pokémon hadn't been scared away yet and was perched there, glaring dubiously down the barrel of his Ruger. Taking down anything of the pidgey or taillow line had never been a challenge; they could hurt him, sure, but he'd only ever been intimidated if a talonflame happened to be staring him down, daring him to pull the trigger with its wild eyes. Something about the fact it could spit fire in his face if he pissed it off too much had been a bit of a deterrence.

The cliff face smoothed and steepened the closer he got to home; the trees around him fell away as he broke from the woods, as the winding trail joined a paved road that emerged from a tunnel in the rock. If he followed the path, it kept to the cliff side for a number of miles and never touched Jheriko, but farther along, the road forked from it and veered off. Gradually, it sloped downhill toward the glittering cluster of small buildings and streets crammed against the foot of the cliff, barely a few minutes' jog from the beach.

To his left lay the glittering expanse of the sea, just a few shades darker than the sky's blue and twice as cold, eating away at the rocks and sand of the island a little more every year. It tended to blind him if he turned his head to stare at it, far below where he pedaled his bike, gleaming with the light it siphoned from the sun to reflect back skyward. The water fed into a wide, sheer-walled lagoon just beneath where the road dropped off a few feet to his left, churning with violent waves and frothy waters. If he fell, he'd either crack his head on the rocks or choke and drown on seawater, so he kept his eyes trained ahead on the empty road, hands gripping the rubber bars as the bike began to propel itself with gravity and momentum—the road dipped down, and he could trace with his eyes where it wound through a small swath of orange woods and fed into the tangle of streets and sidewalks that was Jheriko. He let the road carry him, tense and ready to grab for the paper bag if it tipped out of the cage.

If they watched for him, someone standing out on the streets could stand and see him blaze down the slope, towards the woods, towards Jheriko—they could nudge anyone nearby and say, " _Hey. Look."_ They'd look, and nothing else really needed to be said.

Orson let out a ragged sigh at the thought, flinching when the bright sunlight flickered out as his bike swooped into the sliver of thick forest, momentarily cutting off his sight of town. He knew exactly how many seconds it took to cycle through the woods and he counted each one, breathing in deeply and tensing before he emerged. His face was stoic as his eyes glanced over the nearby street sign, as he passed the first buildings, a smattering of brick houses on the outskirts of town. He swerved to the sidewalk as a car turned the corner ahead, ignoring the skittish man that shuffled away from him as he came near.

He turned a few corners himself, passing through uniform grids of warehouses and low-roofed stores that broke up clusters of houses, all of it roped together by the thick and tangled power lines strung up between poles of rotting wood, some of them loose and sagging too low with the weight of traffic lights or someone's old shoes.

Orson pulled to a stop at the last intersection—just one more turn and he was home.

A chorus of mutterings stirred him from his thoughts and he turned his head to the left, heart already sinking, eyes already narrowing at a duo of teenagers he recognized from school, leaning against the wall of the commissary. Their gazes were trained on him, or rather, the bag, their eyebrows pulled together in mild horror.

"God, what do you think it was?" the girl murmured to the boy beside her, swallowing hard as she stared. Her eyes found Orson's and suddenly she was glaring, but it was a weak glare. Nervous.

He turned away; focused his gaze on the flickering traffic light. _Come on, green…_

"Poor thing."

 _Green. Hurry up._

"There's something wrong with him."

 _Green. Green. Green._ The few passing cars moved so damn slowly—and they stared at him too, those hidden faces behind the wheels, gazing with shaded eye sockets at the wild boy with a shotgun slung across his back. He listened to the grind of tires over tar, he listened to the girl as she whispered, he listened to their _thoughts…_ he swore he could hear them thinking. Thinking loud, angry, ignorant things.

"It's so… cruel."

Green.

He let out a breath, closing his eyes for half a second before pushing off, swerving right. By some stroke of luck, his house was too far down the road for them to see him pull up to it and cast a wild glance around before stepping off the bike. He leaned it against the front porch's whitewashed fencing, taking the bag carefully in his arms.

The house was small and very nearly identical to the others—a red brick box with a few small windows, a narrow front porch, a flat shingled roof. Two stories, with a sliver of backyard and a garage barely large enough to cram the family car. Jheriko's houses were all identical at one point, but each were very lived-in now—most of the citizens had spent their entire lives in town. Each house had its own sort of air, whether that be the particular smell, the dents and bruises on the walls, the style of the furniture or lack thereof—reflective of the people that had lived inside them for decades. Orson's house looked beat-up—shingles missing from the roof, a shattered and duct-taped window there, cracked supports on the porch's fence, a crooked, half-open garage door, but as far as he knew, it had always been that way. He used to think it was the fault of all those people who didn't like his family and took it out on the house, but he knew now that it was just because of the people who lived there. Himself included.

Orson quickly scaled the porch steps and wrenched the front door open, stepping over the threshold and into a haze of dim brown lighting. "Noah?" he called hopefully, kicking the door shut with his heel and listening to the house shudder with the force.

"Calm the hell down!" a voice echoed deeper inside over the buzz of a radio. "And don't slam the door!"

Orson cast a nervous look inside his bag, at the limp body of the pidgeotto—still out. He trekked forward, over the piles of miscellaneous junk collecting against the walls; things like old jackets, shoes, maybe a torn-up book or two, not like anyone living in Orson's house did much reading. The walls were no better—some of it was decorated with childish crayon scribbles, much more was hidden behind endless myriads of framed photographs, some bright with fuzzy colors, most dull shades of black and white.

He maneuvered through it all, rounding the base of the stairs to emerge into the brightly-lit kitchen. He shuffled across the white tile pattern and rested the bag on one of the counter's few cleared-off spaces, staring into the darkness beyond the bar area, past the scratched-up dining table, where he made out a lopsided silhouette of someone's shoulders and head. Someone leaning towards an ancient radio system that stood taller than he was, listening intently as it spat fuzzy streams of dialogue at max volume.

"You're home early," Orson said, leaning on his elbows against the counter.

The boy listening to the radio tilted his head like he was about to look back, but then decided against it. "So are you," he scoffed.

"What, is your screening done? Hey—speaking of which, I finally thought of a question."

Noah sighed, leaning back on the couch after tweaking the volume knob. The sudden decrescendo was disconcerting; Orson found himself aware of the spinning whirr of the living room fan, the creak of pipes in the walls, his own stubborn pulse that hadn't yet slowed from the encounter at the traffic light.

"Took you a week. Hope it's not as dumb as the answer you gave _my_ question."

He was avoiding the first thing Orson asked and he was doing it on purpose. Orson glared at the back of his head.

"No, no—I think you'll get a kick out of this one. So, Noah, where _would_ you most want to be exiled to?"

Noah gave a harsh laugh, finally twisting where he sat to hang an arm over the couch and lock eyes with his younger brother. Theirs were the same, pits of dark brown that missed nothing. "I think these questions are getting a bit too open-ended. It's supposed to be _would you rather_ stuff. Why change it after ten years?"

Orson rolled his eyes. "Just answer it."

"I'm not being screened at the JDR so they can _exile_ me, Orson—"

"Just _answer_ it."

Exaggerated sigh. "Well, I hear Hoenn's nice this time of year."

"Hoenn's nice every time of year."

Noah shrugged, smirking. He turned back around, crossing his arms as he shifted his focus back to the radio program—an energetic play-by-play on some League battle—but Orson knew he was still waiting for his brother to say something else.

"So… Hoenn, then?"

He took a moment before responding, trying to form the right words. "It's… definitely up there on the list. I've always liked the thought of living somewhere like Fallarbor—"

"Cool. You have a question for me yet?"

Noah bowed his head like he was rubbing his eyes, or maybe he was pinching the bridge of his nose—Orson couldn't tell. "I'll think about it. Hey, you did catch something on the hunt, right?"

Orson feigned offense, glaring at the back of his brother's head. "What do you think?"

"What are you stopping here for? Get it to the JDR before it wakes up and beats the shit out of you!"

He stared dubiously at the bag, suddenly tense, every twitch of the paper suddenly a harbinger of the pidgeotto's awakening.

"I'll have a question when you get home. Go!"

"I—I wanted to see if Dad called—"

"He didn't. You know he didn't. Orson, just talk to him when you get there." Noah sighed. "You shouldn't have come home. You could've biked straight there and no one would've seen you—God, it's like you're asking for it now."

Orson narrowed his eyes at nothing, hauling himself into motion to fish the bullet bag out of his pocket and toss it by the sink. "Yeah? Fine, I'll get going. You clean the bullet."

"Take Chronister Street, it cuts around—"

"Albany's faster."

He took the bag into his arms again, leaving his backpack and shotgun on the counter in its place as he made for the front door again, passing into the dark hall between it and the kitchen. The multitude of framed photos hanging on the walls were just black-and-white blurs in his peripheral vision, but he knew what each of them held. He knew when he passed one of the oldest, one of the biggest, the one he always ignored—a grainy image of a potbellied man holding Orson's Ruger in one hand, his other arm wrapped around the snow-white neck of the prey he'd shot dead.

But his prey wasn't a pidgeotto or anything like it. No—he'd shot down something a little bigger; something that would shake the very foundations of Jheriko and its people.

He spared a glance at the caption, something his mom had scribbled in blue pen at the bottom of the photo, her handwriting messy but perfectly formed at the same time— _Grandpa Drew + Valhalla the latias._

Right. That was when the hunters in his family used bullets to kill. That was the last time they used bullets to kill—but it didn't matter, because in the eyes of Jheriko's citizens, to everyone but his own family, Orson was a killer like his long-dead great grandfather. It was their eyes Noah wanted to shield him from when he told his brother to take Chronister, to skip home; he understood that.

But he wasn't his great grandfather. He didn't have to feel ashamed for what he did.

He would never be his great grandfather.

"You are stubborn as Mom was, Orson," Noah called over the static-infused blare of the radio, his voice so clear and defined in contrast it was almost jarring. Orson stood over the threshold between his home and the rather harsh outside, bag cradled in one arm while his hand gripped the doorknob. He paused for barely a second before slamming the door shut again, cutting it all off.

He had a thought as he pedaled away, nothing he'd ever tell his brother, nothing he'd admit to anyone but himself— _Maybe._


	2. In Minutes

It was one of… _those_ moments. Where your mind goes wild and you're not exactly sure what you thought.

It was the first moment I remember. The first after a storm of dark and chaos, the first in which I could navigate my own psyche and feel the soft presence in my mind that was _her_.

In the first moment, there were two of us—in the second, she was torn apart, a nuclear explosion in my skull ripping whatever she was to nothing but atoms and then scorching them all away, one by one, at the speed of light.

* * *

Usually, the trip to the JDR was tedious—after he escaped Jheriko, at least.

But he always noticed when the Anxiety came back. It was a stark, cold feeling, bleeding at the pit of his stomach and scoring ever-so-slowly up his insides. When the Anxiety came back, it was all he could think about, and he found himself too cold to be bored.

He could sit still for hours as it bled through him. He had before _,_ chained to one place by the impervious fear of every part of the world around him, flinching at any sound, choking back the nausea that arose with every voice grating against his ears, clutching his chest like he was trying to pierce it with his fingers and rip out his phantom terror.

He biked up the path, climbing higher in the sky as the sun sank lower, trading places with him. He kept his legs moving, his eyes blinking, forcing the cold blood in him to flow. He had to keep up motion; he had to find some way to force the Anxiety back wherever it came from, because it didn't make _sense_ for it to strike him now.

Perhaps he was imagining it. Maybe the thought of Noah leaving for good had set him on edge—he could never forget that for long.

Orson pressed on, leaning over the bag in the wire cage. It rippled rather violently in the wind as it grew harsher, somehow less timid as the light died, as the sun fell lower, as he biked higher up the precarious cliff-face path, maneuvering his front wheel as best as nine years' experience taught him to, as best as he could when his arms started trembling.

He was in sight of the facility when they did. Stiffening and locking his elbows, he stared ahead, suddenly careless of the thousand tiny rocks and pebbles littering the path, waiting to tip his bike over the edge if he wasn't watching—but none of them dared. He looked up long enough to trace the hulking silver silhouette of the place with his gaze, to notice like he did every time how much it looked like a metallic giant crouched over the cliff side, legs dangling into oblivion, head bowed toward its lap. Petrified and frozen in place for something upwards of seventy years.

As he neared it, the lights dotting the electrical fence gleamed like thick stars, all juxtaposed in a broad ring that lit up the dark stenciled letters on the outside of the giant's left leg—JHERIKO DEPARTMENT OF RESEARCH. The spray-painted words had been reapplied over and over again, sometimes white, sometimes red—sometimes only the better-known abbreviation for the place. This was the ninth week the current words had been there. Something in the back of his mind had always kept track, ever since there was no one left to do it for him.

He pulled up to the gate, feeling his legs go limp in relief as the ground flattened out beneath him. Orson stopped himself when he felt the full force of the gate's artificial light pooling around him, making sure he was in a good place for the security camera to recognize his face, staring up and glaring through the brightness, eyes flicking back and forth between the empty concrete nests perched on either side of the gate. In the JDR's early days, the place had been guarded 24/7, able-bodied men with guns twice as heavy and many times as powerful as Orson's Ruger milling around the nests and the cluttered space beyond the gate. Military men were a common enough sight on the island—yet lately he'd seen none.

His mother would know where they'd gone. His mother knew everything.

The cold in his chest then dropped. Maybe they were concentrated inside the JDR. Maybe something had gone wrong in there—something radioactive, deadly, like that one time before he was born. Orson felt his skin prickle and the shivers trailing down his back; the air in his lungs was suddenly painful and poisonous and lined with beta particles. The restless cold in him inched towards his heart.

He swallowed.

"— _son? Orson Dr_ _ö_ _ge—can you hear me?"_

At the sound he flinched hard, head snapping up to the speaker where it was fixed on the upper base of one of the nests, behind a grate.

" _Can you_ hear _me?"_

Yes, he could hear her—her voice was broken, starkly feminine. What, did she think he'd jumped at the wind?

"What?" he called, narrowing his eyes at the speaker. "Why is—"

" _You're_ _Orson Dr_ _ö_ _ge?"_

"...Yes. I am." His voice was hoarse and stubborn—he thought he felt the coldness seep into his words.

" _Can you answer me a question? Your father told said only you would be able to. And if it's right I'll let you in."_

"My father? What?" Then, stronger, "Yes."

" _Okay. What was the given name of A-ME—3's deceased twin?"_

His face contorted and he stared upwards, searching through the glare of artificial stars for where the woman behind the speaker was watching him, studying every tic of his body language, waiting for him to move in a way that would give away his lie, if his answer was indeed a lie. _His name is Yuri,_ he wanted to snap, but he never would. You couldn't be direct with these people—you needed a lighter touch.

The rush of indignant annoyance in him tried as it might to drown the growing cold in his head, his stomach, but he crushed it all down. He shifted unevenly, stared this way and that, grabbed absently at his ear—he felt her tense, even across this distance. When he spoke, she'd be on the edge of her seat, expecting some bullshit from a random kid hoping to sneak in, but—

"You mean besides A-FE—3? Her name was Shrike."

Silence. He swallowed a grin.

The gates lurched into motion, retracting to reveal the yawning path ahead of him, and the speaker managed to spit out a word— _"Enter."_

* * *

The yawning hallway seemed to stretch and spiral before him; he gritted his teeth as the twin sets of doors cascaded shut at his back, sealing off any lingering light of day and the blooming silver glow of night. He stood barely beyond the threshold, staring into silvery oblivion, feeling like he was standing on the edge of a black hole.

He realized for the first time in nine years that he didn't like this place.

The Anxiety was a cold, stubborn bubble pushing against his heart. His knees tried to shake; he locked them, pulling the paper bag and the pidgeotto against him. His bike leaned on the wall to his right, perched uncertainly, front wheel facing the way he'd come—ready, should he decide to flee.

The bag rustled, and he lurched into motion, staring down the silver pit of gravity that was the hallway, feet locking into the familiar path they took to the ex-room deeper inside the JDR—it was a room that hung over the cliff's edge, built into the giant's leg, equipped with a hatch to the outside that often fell open on its own. The cold inside him froze over at the thought of it and he could imagine himself there, standing over it as the heavy trapdoor swings open and lets the wind rush in, leaning closer and closer to the edge till gravity takes over...

He shivered and killed the thought.

"Orson!"

He froze. He recognized her voice just fine, never mind that it was freed of the static timbres and undertones that had accompanied it outside.

She had emerged another hallway that fed from his, flanked by a more familiar pot-bellied man dressed in pristine white—from his coat to his boots to his thinning hair to the pair of gloves he was turning over and over again in his hands, to the metallic frames of the glasses sliding off his thin nose.

"Lawrence," Orson said, brow furrowing. He glanced back to the woman, who was cutting a lanky figure against the darkened walls behind her. "You were in the gate room? With her? Why?"

He noticed the small cart Dr. Lawrence was reeling behind him, the top of it equipped with a few thin cotton sheets and what looked like a large white hand towel. He'd seen those carts—but only in the ex-rooms, where people like Dr. Lawrence were confined. He'd never known what 'ex' really meant, whether it be externalities or examination or experimentation, but he knew those rooms were a hell of a lot less secretive than what went on in the other wings of the JDR, places Dr. Lawrence and his colleagues were restricted from entering, places like where his dad worked.

The old man gave a curt nod, swinging the cart around in front of him, letting the forced squeals of the wheels dissolve in the black hole hallway. "Orson." He greeted him just as briskly. "You caught something on your hunt? I'll take it back for study."

 _But that's_ my _job. That's what you pay me to do._

He found the woman's eyes, far above his own. Her face, hard-angled and severe, matched up rather perfectly with the static voice he'd heard outside—both exuded an uncertain forced authority, a false strictness. She gave him a thin-lipped smile.

"Why?" he asked, narrowing his eyes, shifting his weight. The bag rustled and small bubbles of cold burst behind his ribs at the motion—for half a moment he was cursing himself for ever having thought a paper bag was enough to contain a pidgeotto ripped from its home, the sky. He eyed a small case resting on Dr. Lawrence's cart, probably containing small syringes with specialized needles, picturing how he'd smash through the lock and grab for one to bury in the neck of the pidgeotto if it woke up now and flew into one of the rampages that had the tendency to leave scars on his face.

Dr. Lawrence cast an uncertain look towards the woman, sidling to Orson with his head down and his hands extended outwards, old ginger root protrusions from the bulky sleeves of his lab coat. "I don't know much, Orson—but the team back in the wing can take it from here. Don't worry, you'll still be paid before you leave tonight."

Orson didn't miss the sharp look the woman shot Dr. Lawrence. He didn't think the old man could bow lower as he rested his gnarly hands on the sides of the bag, struggling against the way Orson tensed and locked his elbows, hands going stiff as the doctor weakly wrenched it from his grasp.

The woman spoke and he started at how much her voice still replicated its static counterpart, how she talked as if he were still an outsider, a shady kid on a bike loitering outside the JDR's gates with a maybe-dead maybe-alive pidgeotto in his arms. "Sorry about this," she said, narrowing her eyes like she was unfamiliar with the word 'sorry'. "But I've been asked to pull you aside. Your father would like to see you."

The Anxiety had been a rising bubble, pressing against his ribs and his lungs, daring Orson to move in such a way that would burst it and send him staggering to the ground under all the weight of the air and the ceiling and the sky that he'd somehow gone without noticing for too long.

Now it was roiling. Ripping and pulling like a tide. He stared at her as his arms fell slowly to his sides, nervous fingers balling the fabric of his jeans as she gazed with a kind of blank curiosity, like she could see what he was thinking and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. He certainly hadn't seemed like the flighty type, looming before the JDR's fortified gates.

"My father," he echoed hollowly, crushing down the pathetic note of disbelief that almost managed to bleed through. "What? Is it about Yuri? What happened?"

Her brow twitched. "No need to panic," she reassured him. She said it like there was something to panic about. The Anxiety seeped and pooled in his lungs, poisoning the air he exhaled.

In his peripheral vision, Dr. Lawrence still had his head bowed like a stricken dog, slipping the unconscious pidgeotto onto the cloth and rifling through the case. Orson caught a flash of sharp silver.

"But…" She dragged the word out till Orson was staring at her again. "I'll need you to come with me."

"Will this be long?" he suddenly asked, mind jumping to Noah—to a grainy, fabricated image of him slumping in the ancient couch they'd shoved in front of the radio, listening absently, eyes flicking to the old grandfather clock ticking in the corner of his eye, watching the minute hand slip faster and faster and the hour hand's sluggish course in its wake, focused on nothing else as they made their stop together at 7:30—and he'd freeze till Orson walked through the door, barely on time as usual.

He wondered what Noah would think if he wasn't back—maybe that the angry people had found a way to turn their frustration into enough courage to jump him on his bike and leave him bleeding and unconscious in a ditch somewhere next to the pidgeotto they'd decided was dead.

Noah refused to admit he was the paranoid type.

"I can't say," she murmured, shuffling back down the darkened hallway from which she'd come as Dr. Lawrence meekly rolled the cart in the opposite direction, not bothering to spare a glance over his shoulder. Orson took a few tentative steps toward the woman till she was confident he was following her. "I can't say what Dr. Dröge wants with you, either. They only sent me to fetch you."

Orson trailed her, studied her from behind—she really was tall, almost terribly so. The inch heels weren't helping, but merely based on how she walked, with her face tilted toward the ceiling, her shoulders set back—it was enough for Orson to deduct that she was too confident to let it bother her. Or perhaps she enjoyed towering over her colleagues. Perhaps it made her feel powerful, like he knew it must've when she droned at him through the loudspeaker.

"What's your name?" he asked, gazing suspiciously at her back.

"...Dr. Bridger."

Unfamiliar—not that his father mentioned the names of his assistants or coworkers. Not that his father ever mentioned anything about his work.

But all the times he'd gone to the JDR, he had never seen her before.

Perhaps she was new. Perhaps her rank within the hierarchy of the JDR's scientists was rather low, despite the age evident in the deep wrinkles on her forehead and the spearow's feet he'd seen lining her eyes. She _had_ admitted to not knowing what was going on.

 _In essence,_ his father had said before, leaning across the dinner table with a fork in each hand and a wide-eyed expression on his face, _the JDR is like the world's most exclusive club. You're in or you're out. And even if you're in—_ he'd paused for effect, staring both his sons in the face before continuing— _you're still sort of out. Most of the time, anyway._ He'd hardly tried to hide his smirk.

Dr. Bridger was, most definitely, out.

 _But not you, Dad,_ Noah had said with a grin, thinly attempting to mask the pride in his voice.

 _Nope._ Dr. Dröge chewed and swallowed before flashing his sons an odd smile. _Not me._

Uncertain as she was—she knew where she was going. She took twelve turns and two short flights of stairs, Orson trailing in her wake, trying to fathom the blueprints of JDR and how the place must span out like a web on the sheet, hundreds of little fiber hallways darting this way and that in a building meant to confuse anyone who tried to navigate it, anyone who wasn't meant to be there.

Orson didn't know what he was expecting. Maybe a gradual arrival at some grand set of heavy double doors that were otherwise four-foot thick concrete walls without a key—not Dr. Bridger's sudden stop in the middle of the hallway, the tense way she said, "We're here," the small windowless door in the wall that had been left ajar for them.

She stood aside, taking the handle with her, nodding at him. He stared across the threshold—his eyes didn't get far.

"Orson."

His father stood there—a tall, broad-framed man gazing out of a face that was a mirror image of his son's, albeit aged forty years and pockmarked with old radiation scars instead of the pale lines scoring across Orson's. On both their heads were thick shocks of dark and unruly hair—though his father's was shot through with silver, remnants of the time when Atticus Dröge had been "susceptible to stress"—now, as he said, it was part of him, it lived and flourished in him, it was something he would never be free of—and it bothered him no longer.

Orson stared at his father in something that felt like disbelief but wasn't. His eyes narrowed as Dr. Dröge gripped his son by the shoulders, swallowing and trying a smile that wasn't real. "Kid. You made it." His voice was a strong, rasping whisper.

"What's going on?" Orson murmured, suddenly scared a sound too loud would shatter this moment, suddenly cursing himself for speaking and making it pass.

"Come inside," his father said quietly, eyes flicking away from Orson's to stare into the hallway that was a cheap imitation of the gravity pit he'd first walked into—and he found Dr. Bridger, reduced to nothing but the uncertainty she tried to hide without the severity of her face and posture and voice, nothing but a nervous twig of a woman in the presence of the acclaimed Dr. Dröge, under the weight of his stare and his voice—"Celia," he said, "Thank you."

Like that, Dr. Celia Bridger was dismissed. She tried to croak out a few words, gave up, and hurried back the way she'd come.

Orson felt alone, standing in his father's steadily loosening grip. The Anxiety was no longer a bubble, no longer a roiling tide, but something he felt streaming through his blood, pushing against his ribs with his pulse, echoing in the wake of his thoughts.

It would consume him. In minutes.

"Is this…" Orson swallowed, unsteady for a moment as his father backed away from him, into the clean, sterile darkness of the room at his back. He began again. "Is this about Yuri?"

His father looked away, his eyes focusing on something unseen. The darkness was not so thick, Orson realized, as he crossed the event horizon and arrived at his father's side. There was light coming from somewhere. He then saw what it was Dr. Dröge was staring at, and he wanted to look away, but the cold had frozen him from the inside out.

"Yes," murmured Dr. Dröge. "This is about Yuri."

* * *

I know what they're doing. They think if they blind me, I cannot see.

But I do see - smudges of heat dancing in a void, reaching here and there with twiggy arms and saying this and that in sharp-edged voices.

I'll be in the tank again soon. In minutes.

It does to me what it does to him. They've discovered that we're the same, he and I, if we want to be.

But _he_ has no control over what is to come. And I cannot save him. He knows I can't, and for this I fear he may resent me.


	3. Angel of Death

I am A-ME—3.

My name is Yuri.

I am named for the man who was first to reach space—first of any other man, at least. And I was made to don this title as if I could somehow live up to it.

She was A-FE—3.

Her name was Shrike.

She was named for a little bird with a wicked beak. She had unfortunately been too little and not quite wicked enough to survive.

He is Orson.

His name is and will always be Orson.

What it means and why he has it will forever be a mystery to me.

* * *

Yuri was a vast sort of creature—even for a latios.

Beyond the one-way window, he hung limp in the leather harness linked with steel buckles, a green-cyan juggernaut bowing his head to the floor in submission, his sleek muzzle barely an inch from the surface of the isolation tank's phosphorescent water. Orson watched it slosh against the wall between him and it, noticing the smeared edges to every shape beyond it and deciding it must be simply a screen, that Yuri was likely far away from him, yet still he wondered—if Yuri wanted to, how much force would it take him to tear out of the harness and smash through the screen and the distance between them? He would never know the answer to that, but he believed in it, he could picture it, a shower of pixels and electric light in harsh Technicolor clarity.

Something like that couldn't be too difficult for a creature like him, but Yuri would not wake up. If he could, he might accidentally kill Orson and half the staff of the JDR, catching them in the crossfire of his built-up and uncontrollable power.

So he only hung there, still like he was dead, like the wires and tubes snaking out from beneath his massive wings and crown were sucking his life away instead of keeping his heart pumping as the injections screaming through his blood dulled all nine of his senses. They aimed to make him a lifeless husk, to render his body useless dead weight and his mind an instrument of godlike creation or destruction to make up for the strength he lacked— _a tool,_ as he thought but never said.

"Dad," Orson rasped, shifting back in the dark room, shouldering away from the arm his father had draped across his son. There was panic boiling in his chest, bubbling and popping and reducing the Anxiety to an evil steam inside him. "Dad, I can't—"

"Orson, please," his father murmured, catching him again and pulling him deeper into the blue-stricken darkness of the room, his hands casts of iron, his voice stiff and brittle like balsa wood.

"Y-you were supposed to call," Orson rasped, finding his legs were too weak to resist as Dr. Dröge steered him closer to Yuri's dead-asleep silhouette against the aquamarine light that blazed through the unsteady currents and bubble streams under the water, reflected by its curved mirror wall opposite his father's isolated room. "You have to tell me when you're about to put him under, Dad," he croaked, his eyes falling on a dark shape rising from the floor ahead of him, lit up by the mini flecks of light spanning across the length of a control panel set against the thick screen wall. A chair—tall, metallic.

"I know," came his father's hollowed response.

" _Atticus."_

Orson didn't have the strength to jump at the sound, a word spat alongside a stream of static from a transistor radio set into the panel. His father tensed, hurrying his son towards the chair, his breath clouding near Orson's ear.

" _Atticus, acknowledge."_

"Here," Dr. Dröge barked before murmuring to his son, "Hurry now. Sit up here."

" _We have to move or the drugs won't retain their potency—etorphine doesn't work so well with this one. Tell me you've got him."_

"I'm well aware of the situation—and Orson is here. Celia delivered him. Give me a minute."

" _He's agitated, Doctor. You need to—"_

Orson didn't hear the rest. His father pushed him towards the chair—he realized it had been brought to the room, not set into the floor with bolts and a hammer. This place was merely a makeshift observation room; it had to be. Not like they could take Orson into the actual Valhalla wing where they kept all the eons.

"Dad, no," Orson whispered, wishing he could sprint, but the Anxiety always found a way to rob him of all his energy to keep itself alive and blazing through his veins. Maybe he thought he wanted to run, but all he really wanted to do was collapse. He locked his knees, swayed on his feet.

Dr. Dröge tapped his son on the shoulder and there was barely an ounce of force behind the gesture, but he fell back and back until gravity took over and crushed him into the seat. Orson could move nothing but his mouth. "Don't do this—don't put him in the tank."

"I have to know," Dr. Dröge whispered, grabbing his son by the wrists and buckling them against the leather armrests, then his ankles, then his neck, then a thick belt around his waist. Orson was a husk, his blank eyes focused on the pixelized image of Yuri and his smeared reflection in the mirror walls, noticing absently how high-quality the picture was, how the water that sloshed against the other side of the wall nearest to him was so realistic.

"Know what?" Orson choked out. "Know what? Dad, let me go home. Please. Don't do this—I'm begging you."

It was around this moment that Orson noticed—the screen was not a screen. It was very thick glass, unbreakable to anything but Yuri.

"I have to _know,"_ Dr. Dröge snapped, standing directly behind his son, his callused hands fixing tiny sensor pads onto Orson's temples, his forehead, pushing back his unruly bangs. "I have to know why this creature is hurting my son!"

" _Yuri!"_ He had to breathe in hard to make the sound, and it was born of nothing but the panic that was strong enough to poison his thoughts, yet too weak to pump any adrenaline into his muscles. " _Wake up! Break free! Wake the fuck up!"_

"Orson." His father's hand flattened against his head and pushed it against the headrest, sealing another sensor onto his skin with his other hand, just under the collar of his t-shirt. The wires snaked around his neck, up his arms, to somewhere unseen. "He can't hear you."

"Let me go, Dad. Please let me go." His voice cracked and rasped.

Dr. Dröge ran a hand through Orson's hair like he did when he was younger. Much younger. "What are you afraid of? There's nothing scary here. Everything is going to be fine."

"He's not hurting me, Dad. You have to leave him alone."

"Just relax. Breathe. You'll be okay."

But Yuri won't, he wanted to scream. He said nothing.

"It won't be more than two hours, Orson. I'll drive us home."

"Why now?" he whispered. "Why not years ago?"

But his father was leaving him. He strode across the room, a tall, dark shape cutting through the blackness with practiced precision, bending over the panel by the transistor radio.

"Rusakova. We're ready."

There was a burst of static, then, " _He's secured? Everything hooked up?"_

Dr. Dröge gave an irritated snort. "Yes—"

"Hooked up to what?" Orson asked loudly. "I'm not hooked up to anything."

His father's head snapped in Orson's direction, his face still swamped in the flickering darkness of the room.

"Dad, you said we were leaving," Orson continued, choking back the lump in his throat, eyes wide, avoiding the sharp but unseen gaze of his father. He could feel it. "So let's go."

" _Atticus—that's him? What's going on over there?"_

"Ignore him," Dr. Dröge growled, leaning close to the radio. "He's trying to stall. I've got him secured; you should be getting his vitals by now."

"Secured to what?" Orson called. "I'm standing right here." He tried to force some strength into his bones, his muscles—he had to shake off the sensors, he had to break their immobilizing and serpentine grip on him, he had to burn through the leather clamping him against the makeshift seat.

And he had to stop his heart from sinking at the futility of even trying to resist.

But then he saw the coil of wires and how close they were to his face—and if he could just turn his head, he could tear them with his teeth, he could—

" _We're receiving. Got his readings up on the main screen. It's odd—they're matching with—"_

"Good," Atticus murmured, but there was something dark in his voice.

" _Do me a favor,"_ the radio spat. _"Turn on the video feed for your side."_

 _Shit! No!_

"You don't trust me?" Atticus snorted, but Orson felt the anger in his voice.

" _There's no time for this. Turn on the damn feed and let's get moving."_

Atticus was silent, but he reached across the panel and let his hand fall on a few switches with such violence that Orson had to flinch.

A tiny red light set into the upper right corner of the room flicked on. Orson stared into it, feeling his face fall and go numb, frozen in something like defeat.

"You should know to trust me," Atticus muttered.

There was a sudden metallic whistle, an echoed scream of unoiled gears grinding into motion.

Yuri had begun to move—not his body, minus the swaying of his ear tufts, but the hydraulic steel arms suspending him above the isolation tank.

" _Even when your own son doesn't?"_ came the voice, void of anything but static. Then, to him, " _Nice try, kid. Another minute or so and we would've had to reinject the big guy."_

"Maybe you should," Orson rasped. "Just to be safe."

A noise came from the speaker, a fuzzy burst of sound that was over in half a second. He thought it was a laugh.

* * *

I should be dead. Eons don't survive alone.

There is only one moment in the billions that make up the span of time I've been alive in which I remember being at peace. In that moment, Shrike was alive.

It was enough to know she died. It was too much to know I killed her—I had crushed her inside our shell and obliterated whatever remained but the condensing ingredients of her soul dew with the wave of energy that freed me.

I remember fleeing. I remember searching for something to fill the void in my mind and finding Orson.

* * *

He'd never been quite sure what would constitute a normal day in island Jheriko's forests. Orson had only just turned seven but already his four-times weekly trips to the woods with his mother were becoming so natural and familiar to him, whatever odd things happened day to day, that it made him wonder if before he was born, when he was barely an embryo in his mother's stomach, she had traveled to the forests by herself to make sure he'd be used to the place when he grew old enough to come with her again.

They used to take walks through the trees. Or, before he learned how, she would walk, and he'd be perched on her shoulders or pinned to her side.

One day after a few birthdays he didn't remember, they veered off course and hit a small clearing deeper through the trees. She'd taken out what he'd later learned was her father's old shotgun and let him try and hold it. He guessed years later it hadn't been loaded, but there was nothing he could put past his mother.

He spent the next year of his life watching her fire it, and the next couple learning to do it like she could. That was before he knew she had cancer, but not before she knew herself.

At seven, he had a few expectations for their forests hunting trips. One, his mother had to be with him. Two, they each needed to be carrying at least five knockout bullets. Three, they had to beat Daddy home and get there before Noah finished microwaving dinner.

It was a Saturday. Orson was alone when it happened, and all was right. His mother was… somewhere. He'd tried to start a tag game with her, bet her three dollars that he could take down a pidgey before she could tag him back, but he never expected himself to outrun her so easily. It was his stubby, unbalanced legs against hers, long and lean—yet he'd left her in the dust, before stopping and leaning against a thick oak trunk and switching off the homemade safety his mother had fashioned when she'd started teaching him to shoot. Back then, the Ruger had a professionally-crafted scope with a clear plastic lens—through it, he focused on a tiny pidgey picking around the roots of a great, sprawling tree, foraging a mere thirty or forty feet from him. His ears were pricked for the malicious sound of approaching footsteps, but he never would have guessed how far from him his mother had trailed. The sound that met his ears instead was nothing like he'd ever heard—a mangled, choking scream, a wordless, inhuman noise, and the feeble whistle of jet wings not quite breaking Mach 1, accentuated by a crescendo of snapping twigs and branches and a hail of wood from above.

The pidgey was long gone when he looked up, suddenly so afraid of the wild and untamed world around him, now that his mother wasn't here to make it seem like he belonged in it.

But he saw the monster that'd stumbled upon him and the fear was gone. In its place was a crazed sort of joy, unnatural excitement in the face of something that could, if it chose, kill him with just a flicker of its immense psychic energy.

But he must've been the first of his family since Great-grandpa Drew to stumble upon an eon in the wild—and oh, it was a beautiful creature, an angel of some kind, its silver down glimmering like water where it caught the lazy yellow light of past noon, its eyes blazing amber like the sun when it rose, its jet body writhing where it hung in the canopies. Whatever instinct that had made his grandfather raise the barrel of his shotgun and shoot the creature down had abandoned Orson, if it'd ever been part of him in the first place.

It had to be a latios. He'd never seen one himself, though just by looking at it he knew his father could probably tell him exactly how old it was, the kind of brainwaves it was most likely emitting due to the expression on its face, its region of origin—anything. Orson didn't know what his father did in the JDR all day, except that eons like the thing in the famous Great-grandpa Drew photo had something to do with his daily work. He'd tried to ask Dr. Dröge instead—he just liked to say, "I'm making the holes for the donuts," or "We're designing the lights for the fireflies." Obviously, he meant the volbeat and illumise, but his father tended to prefer the archaic words for certain pokémon.

He would call the latios a male eon, nothing more. And looking at him, Orson marveled at how his father could think a creature so graceful, so finely formed, was undeserving of even a name.

Much of what happened next was a blur. He thought the latios had touched him, though what his eyes remembered told him that he had remained in the canopies throughout their encounter and all Orson had felt was a blaze of pure power through the fabric of his mind, a cathartic rush in his chest and a sudden feeling like he'd filled with helium and now it was struggling against the weight of his bones, trying to drag him higher.

He thought his mother finally found him and bustled him home, wheezing all the way. He thought he didn't eat much that night, aching to tell Noah what he'd seen, but unable to get past his mother's leery, blue-eyed stare.

He wasn't scared, not like she was. How would she have reacted if she knew the latios had been near him, not just loose in the woods that night? What would his father have said if he knew A-ME—3, the missing eon he told his wife about when he returned home early next morning, had been close enough to his son to hurt him?

Surely then, he wouldn't have driven out with the search parties and gunmen only to track it down. He would have been out to kill it.

Orson knew this: to tell his parents would bring him or the latios no good, though he wished with every atom of himself to let them know just why he was so indescribably happy those following weeks, why he kept staring out the window, why his questions about his father's work had escalated from their usual irritating constancy to relentless barrages of inquiry and the farthest-fetched of speculation.

His first seizure was three months later.

He had been outside a little past 5:15 some summer evening. He and Noah were standing on opposite sides of the road playing catch with a football—they knew they had little time before cars would start rolling down their street. Noah wanted him to get at least one good throw in before they went inside. That he remembered clearly. He'd started the evening standing in the yard, facing Noah across the street, but gradually he realized his arm strength couldn't match his brother's, not quite. He'd shifted closer every throw, once in a while casting glances to his left or right for oncoming cars.

"One more," Noah had called, knees bent in a ready catching stance. If cars came from the right, he probably wouldn't see them—the glare of the sinking sun was a bit much. That had been worrying him since they'd started playing.

No. Something had been worrying him all day. Something he couldn't put a finger on.

Orson had gripped the football hard, swallowing, hiking his elbow back. If he didn't make this one, if he wasn't close, he would tell Noah he'd been feeling sick and cold all day, and that was why he was too weak. He wound back, flexing his shoulder for the throw—and then he _couldn't,_ he froze; his muscles seized and locked, a shiver coursed through his bones as he realized he lost control, and it was a terrifying thing to feel. His kinesthetic sense was gone. His legs didn't move, but he lost his balance and crumpled heavily onto the warm tar, the air hiccupping in his throat when he felt it scrape a few layers of skin off his knees.

"Orson?"

And then it got worse. He felt the cold in him burst and freeze the sweat in his hair, on his bare arms, he felt himself shiver like it was winter and getting colder, and with every degree it dropped he would tremble more violently till all of him was shaking—his teeth, his heart, his glazed eyes in their sockets. The pain hit and it coursed through him, riding his nerves up and down his body, pulverizing his limbs, his thoughts—

" _Orson!"_

His brother must've ran to his side. That's what brothers do.

He'd thought there might've been an obnoxious blaring of a car horn, but it phased rather nicely into the roar in his head, some ugly, evil roar.

He would've screamed but it hurt too much. It took him over. It forced his consciousness to cower in the back of his mind, to shut off everything it could, to do anything to protect him, and he remembered a moment in which he found himself aware that thinking wasn't possible anymore—there was no processing of the pain. Just pain. And anything his mind could do to shut itself off could not get rid of the fear.

His first seizure was the worst one.

"You practically caused an accident," Noah told him later.

His parents didn't let him outside for the rest of the summer. Every doctor in Jheriko, even those that worked in the JDR, thought it was heat stroke. Even though the temperature that day hadn't breached a humid 85.

Later, he'd learned that day was Yuri's first in the isolation tank. No one thought anything of it.

When his second seizure hit, it was half a year later, and he was home alone. He'd crouched on the floor of his room and tried to brave through it—much later, his father came home. At work that day, he'd monitored A-ME—3's melatonin and adenosine levels during his second tank session since his birth about ten months before.

That's when he knew.

And that's when he decided he hated the cold—no, he feared the cold. It meant it couldn't be long till he crumbled again. It meant the hours he had to be himself were waning.

Sitting strapped to the chair, watching with empty defeat, groundless anger as his friend was lowered into the vile, gleaming water—he didn't understand how his father had figured it out. His father, the man only home for brief hours at a time, who'd never even seen one of Orson's seizures, who had no reason to notice the connection between his son and one of the hundred eons, give or take, he kept at the JDR.

Eons don't survive alone. The fact Yuri had lost his sister had been enough for the Valhalla research team to consider euthanizing him immediately, but Orson knew if they found the link between him and his seizures, he would have hours to live.

Dr. Dröge would leave the job to his assistants. He'd drive Orson home as soon as he knew he was stable.

And he would be free.

Orson curled his fists around the armrests, flinching at the spikes of fury that impaled him from the inside. He didn't know if they were his or Yuri's—but they were the last thing he felt before those thin, blissful moments during which he felt nothing.

And then, the contents of his mind seemed to implode.


End file.
